Katie Prescott
speaker
250 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 11 Jun
Katie Prescott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And a whistleblower came forward and said, look, there are problems in the accounts.
And a year later, HP accused autonomy of fraud.
And that's when people started to pour over the numbers.
And it turned out that...
the management of autonomy had been recognising revenue, essentially telling the market that they'd sold stuff which they hadn't, pushing up their numbers.
And HP alleged that that was in order to make them more attractive to a buyer like HP.
And this was the catalyst which sparked more than a decade of court battles between Mike Lynch, his CFO, Sushivan Hussain, who was eventually sent to prison over this in the US,
And it's a case that's still going on, unbelievably.
So, confusingly, as you said in your introduction, Mike Lynch was acquitted in the US in a criminal jury trial, but a judge here, after looking at this for two years, found for HP, and only this year... So the trial started in 2019, the sale was 2011.
Only this year decided that...
Lynch should have to pay £700 million, or his estate, I should say, after his tragic death last year.
The lawyers were in court a few weeks ago again, and HP's lawyers would like to see interest on that sum, pushing it well over a billion pounds.
The judge has gone away again, and we'll find out the final sum in due course.
But we think that the Lynch estate is worth $500 million, which clearly wouldn't even clear that initial $700 million sum.
So it really is an ongoing saga.
It's something that came up very, very quickly in my research when I started speaking to people at Autonomy who had worked for him, was that he was ruthless, incredibly driven, and would...
ride roughshod over people who worked for him in many cases.
I was quite, I have to say, surprised by the extent of this.
And some people spoke to me, grown men, about the trauma that they still feel talking about their time working for him.
I should say, though, to balance that out, he also had a lot of group of very loyal people to him, especially people in his tech team who he really, really valued.
Showing 221–240 of 250 · page 12 of 13
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